2: The Use of Self in Coaching

It seems to us that when we, as coaches, discuss our profession, we tend to focus most of our attention on those techniques, tools, and processes that we frequently employ in our craft. In all of this, the coach himself easily disappears from view. It’s almost as if we think of coaching as something that is done TO the client, with the coach somehow magically insulated from the coaching process. In treating coaching as a science, we seem to lean toward “total objectivity.”

We know now, that science is a largely subjective enterprise. In the human sciences, this is particularly the case. In the case of coaching, subjectivity incorporates not only our view and perception of the world, but also our awareness of self in the interaction and process of coaching. In truth, regardless of what we bring to our craft in terms of technique, our knowledge and skills are useless unless we understand how our use of self impacts the coaching process.